FRIDAY MUSIC: Dave Brubeck, by JD

This week’s music comes from the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

David Warren Brubeck was an American jazz pianist and composer. Often regarded as a foremost exponent of cool jazz, Brubeck’s work is characterized by unusual time signatures and superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities, and combining different styles and genres, such as classical, jazz, and blues.

In the early Sixties Brubeck ‘invaded’ the pop charts with his single “Take Five” which became the best selling jazz record of all time. In the late fifties Brubeck was experimenting with unusual time signatures in two albums; Time Out and Time Further Out.

The following selection is not all by his Quartet but helps to illustrate the influence he has had on subsequent musicians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Brubeck

https://www.davebrubeck.com/

Dave Brubeck Quartet – Take Five (Live In Germany, 1966)

Jon Lord – Unsquare Dance (Dave Brubeck)

Jon Lord was keyboard player with Deep Purple and left the band because of the touring which was too tiring. He then concentrated on writing and recording new music. He also adapted existing music and recorded his own variations on themes including Unsquare Dance and I think it is better than the various Brubeck versions available on YouTube.

Brubeck: Koto Song | The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Live in Belgium 1964

Dave Brubeck – Golden Brown

Of course that was not Dave Brubeck playing Golden Brown by The Stranglers and it was not put together with AI. It was assembled before AI by Laurence Mason using tape editing etc as explained here -

A couple of people have asked how I made this video so here we go -
I took a clip from a 1964 live version of Take Five ( • Dave Brubeck – Take Five ) and made the drum loop by chopping up the intro and turning it from 5/4 into the 3/4 – 4/4 groove that Golden Brown has. The upright bass sound is sequenced from Logic, and the piano part was played in using one of the piano sounds from a Nord Electro 5D. Then I played the sax part over the top (I play a King Zephyr alto and for this I used a hard rubber Yanigasawa mouthpiece rather than my usual bright Guardala).
The video was then edited using the clip I’d taken the drum loop from.

Dave Brubeck Quartet – Take the “A” Train (Live In Germany, 1966)

That should set your feet tapping!

Source: http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2026/08/friday-music-dave-brubeck-by-jd.html